With further warming, climate change risks will become more complex and so harder to manage. Multiple climatic and non-climatic risk drivers will interact. Climate-driven food insecurity and supply instability, for example, are projected to worsen as the planet warms. Those will interact with non-climatic risk drivers such as competition for land and pandemics.

..and so risks accumulate

Key categories

At COP29, richer countries pledged $300 billion a year to help poorer countries fight climate change. The record-breaking sum was finally announced in Baku at 0300hrs local time on 24 November – after talks had run 33 hours late. But it fell far short of the $1.3 trillion developing countries had pushed for.  While world leaders struggle to come to terms with the skewed dynamic of who causes and who endures climate change, there is widespread agreement that it has already reduced food, energy and water security. 

The effects of climate change such as extreme weather events, rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are socio-economic.

Climate change is a societal problem… 

For now, warming continues…

For now, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to warm the globe. This will affect all major climate system components, not least the global water cycle, its variability, and global monsoon precipitation, leading to very wet and very dry weather and climate events and seasons. Compound heatwaves and droughts are projected to become more frequent, leading to concurrent events across multiple locations.

Western militaries and defence planners, national security think tanks and intelligence agencies, the UN, IMF and World Bank, state development agencies, humanitarian and development NGOs, environmental campaigners, mainstream liberal media and authoritarian governments in the Global South:

The Sudanese government at the UN Security Council said

Then-president Omar Al-Bashir claimed that

This reframing of the conflict distracts from and hides the political causes of the conflict: the government’s disregard for the western region and its non-Arab population. 

For militaries and defence planners, this serves to make them more relevant. If climate change is considered a security threat, it would make sense to spend more money on the military. National security think tanks and intelligence agencies also stand to secure more funding. 

For authoritarian regimes and elites, climate change can be a scapegoat. Instead of taking responsibility for socio-economic issues or bad policies, they can blame climate change. This also fits into the wider – and not unfounded – discourse of holding the Global North responsible. 

If climate change has negative socio-economic impacts, then surely it has significant consequences for (in)security.

In short:

increases the risk of armed conflict.

or migration,

through resource competition

Climate change,

Climate change,

and civil and political conflict

This interacts with existing patterns of poverty and fragility.

migration and displacement,

economic and social vulnerability

Those, in turn feed resource competition,

exacerbating resource pressures and scarcities

causes both short-term environmental shocks and long-term trends

Usually, the argument goes like this:

See here for the 7 commonly suggested pathways linking climate change to violent conflict. 

Climate change mitigation can also negatively affect societies, in particular vulnerable groups, and strengthen the position of those in power. 

Compared with the noise on climate change as a cause of conflict, there is much less talk of the potential harms of some climate actions to human security. And that is crucial, given the way that some authoritarian regimes have used the climate-conflict link to deflect blame and implement extraordinary measures. Those may in turn lead to conflict.  

That is most likely to happen in countries where there are high climatic and political risks.

Drawing on Dragonfly risk ratings, this graphic shows political and climatic risk scores for each country, grouped by region. Dragonfly’s climatic risk rating takes into account historical and current data on floods, droughts, cyclones and air quality. The political risk rating is a composite score of the Civil Conflict, Civil Unrest, Crisis Risk, Regime Instability, Security & Safety Risk, and Terrorism Risk Dragonfly ratings. 

Climate change mitigation measures are not all good

Let’s consider in depth two mitigation strategies; hydraulic development and reforestation/green energy projects. 

Climate action has the potential to cause insecurity in different ways. For instance, the rapid decarbonisation of energy systems affects demand and rents of high-market-value resources, such as oil and gas. This can destabilise resource-dependent states like Iraq or Venezuela.

Those climate actions can lead to specific security risks

A common response by political elites to water scarcity is to construct large dams, securing sizeable water reservoirs. Another approach taken to combat climate change is planting trees, a lot of them. This seems sensible, as (re)forestation, at least in theory, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

However large-scale forestation projects can be detrimental to local communities and biodiversity. Their opponents call this ‘Green-grabbing’. 

The need to limit climate change and mitigate its effects is urgent. This is generally agreed upon in academic and policy circles. However, as climate change is used to justify extreme measures, such as constructing megadams and buying up vast areas of land, by international organisations and national governments, it is crucial to examine these actions and their potential side effects more closely.

For example, a new dam intended to reduce water scarcity and prevent conflict may actually increase those risks by displacing communities and damaging the environment. Similarly, large areas of land purchased by companies to plant forests might aim to offset CO2 emissions but could end up displacing local communities and having little positive impact on the environment.

These interventions often interact with existing power dynamics, meaning that elites can further marginalise communities. This can lead to protests and even armed violence. And so for organisations looking to analyse how climate change might affect security risks, it will be important for them to scrutinise not just the effects of climate change itself but also those measures taken to counter it.